Further editing with VirtualDub

Only a little more complicated than the previous post, this will explain how to delete any part(s) of a clip you like, or save any part you like.

Vital points to remember

• Deleting parts of the clip from the timeline doesn't harm the original clip - the only time a file is changed is when you finally save the result. So if you mess up you can always just reload the original.
• A selection on the timeline consists of the frames from the first up to but not including the last one.

Editing without losing picture quality

It's very simple to delete a segment from a clip. Select the first frame, click Mark-in, select the frame where you want the video to pick up again and click Mark-out, then press Del. Repeat this as many times as you like. To extract a segment as a separate file, just select it and save from the File menu as usual.

But to avoid the picture degrading due to re-encoding the video (and also to make selecting the correct end points easier) it's important to keep to key frames. For a full explanation, see the Help topics under Processing -> Direct mode. Meanwhile, select Direct stream copy from the Video menu and follow these rules:

• When deleting a segment, always end the selection with a key frame (or the end of the clip)
• When extracting and saving a segment, always begin with a key frame

Free editing

If you can't keep to key frames then you must change the processing options. Go to the Video menu and select Full processing mode, then Smart rendering. This will only re-encode the frames that are strictly necessary, not the whole thing.

Make sure that you only re-encode these frames once. Don't snip 50 frames, save, load the output file, decide it wasn't enough and snip 10 more and save again. Leave this editing step till the very last moment, especially if you're going to use further processing such as cropping and resizing.